


Events May Play Out Queer as Cards

by halotolerant



Category: Joan Aiken - Wolves of Willoughby Chase series
Genre: F/F, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, recipient:KB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-29
Updated: 2010-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:33:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thank you very much to Tree for lightning-fast beta at the (near literal) eleventh hour! I was so pleased to find this prompt and I wish I'd had more time. I very much hope to return to this fandom now.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Events May Play Out Queer as Cards

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much to Tree for lightning-fast beta at the (near literal) eleventh hour! I was so pleased to find this prompt and I wish I'd had more time. I very much hope to return to this fandom now.

  
  


  
  
  


 

  


## Events May Play Out Queer as Cards

 

Fandom: [Joan Aiken - Wolves of Willoughby Chase series](http://yuletidetreasure.org/get_fandom_quicksearch.cgi?Fandom=Joan%20Aiken%20-%20Wolves%20of%20Willoughby%20Chase%20series)

 

Written for: KB in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge

by [halotolerant](http://yuletidetreasure.org/cgi-bin/contact.cgi?filename=55/eventsmay)

Thank you very much to Tree for lightning-fast beta at the (near literal) eleventh hour! I was so pleased to find this prompt and I wish I'd had more time. I very much hope to return to this fandom now.

The servants have placed the wrong linen on the tables and the soup spoons are mislaid.

That sounds, Sophie thinks, like a French conjugation. Like the ones she attempted to learn after her elevation to the aristocracy. Those elegant phrases and tricks of the tongue that eluded her, much as embroidery did. French language and French knots, both unachievable, plain speech and plain stitch rising always more readily in her.

She taps her ivory fan against her dress, against the grey and peach satin gown that encloses her.

Her head aches with the weight of her hair, which is piled up and powdered like a gelatine pudding and has feathers stuck into it that might have appeared better on the poor birds killed to pluck them. Her neck feels more than naked, extremely exposed, and she knows that she is flinching when people come near like a new lamb from a hand.

Far away on the other side of the dining room, a man splashes, dropping a silver finger-bowl and Sophie remembers the otters, in the days when she was young. Remembers fish and fresh air and being naked unless you were cold, in which case you snuggled up to another warm body and relaxed again. Remembers the gap between instinct and action being tiny as the will to act.

She had no things then. No things at all. Later, with Simon in Gloober's Poor Farm, there were precious gifts - bread, a cheese rind, an apple core from the Matron's table that had rolled off her dinner tray. These were priceless and they gave them mostly to each other, and the giving was valuable, more than what could otherwise be gained from the scraps.

Sold from the farm and taken to town along with the veal calves for Smithfield market, as a serving maid to the Duchess, she'd had the odd penny for herself. A new mob cap, a length of black velvet ribbon, a scoop of sweet poke or a mug of coffee.

A piece of cloth that she'd once made into a dress, to let a friend of Simon's called Dido Twite go to Clapham fair.

Sophie taps her fan on her thigh again, harder this time, watching her servants scurrying in their yellow livery, busy as bees building a comb as they craft the skeleton of what will be her birthday dinner party. Simon will come, naturally, it being his birthday too, which should be reason enough to smile - she never sees her brother as often as she wishes. But then of course there will be dignitaries, to whom she must be polite and interested in tales about shooting and curtains.

So early in the evening, and already she feels tired. If this corset were not so tight.

If she were not so distressed.

But she must not be. She must look about her and think of where she is.

There are five forks to be set at each place and knives to match in glimmering ranks of silver. There are to be new plates for each course and napkins besides and the food will be fashioned into cunning shapes and devices, never appearing to be what it is.

There are too many things in her house now, she has often thought. Her husband - dear Podge, so kind, always so gentle - doting and only wishing to see her happy, has brought her trinkets and toys that she might play with all day, if she were not more likely to be sitting at a window, forehead pressed to the ice-cold glass, praying for the heat and ache in herself to stop.

Looking for someone on the gravel walk way outside, looking to see if they look for her.

Though she shall not do that any more, shall she?

Her treasures, such as they are, are hidden in an old hatbox at the back of her wardrobe. They are sentimental things, no value beyond their evocative power over her - a playbill, a tin mug, a ticket, an old piece of needlework, a silhouette portrait and a pebble; worn smooth, retrieved when she'd been to visit the forest where she'd spent the first five years of her life.

It had not seemed smaller than she remembered. It had seemed more vast, more terrifying. She had realised, sadly, that it had not changed and she had.

Sometimes in Sophie's head the whole house burns down. She runs from the flames with that box, and people commiserate with her and she smiles and smiles and tells them she has lost nothing that matters. And then, in the dream, a slim, dark figure comes forward from the crowd and says "You must come home with me now. You can come with me now."

It was always a dream. Now it is an impossibility.

The tapping ineffective in altering the journey of her thoughts, Sophie spreads the fan wide as a peacock's tail and hides her eyes behind it, leaning a hand blindly on the wall behind her.

Lets the walls in her mind fall complete as Jericho, and allows herself to remember.

\- - -  
\- - -

Dido had fallen over in the mud and didn't care. Sophie remembers it clearly, the smell of earth and leaf mould and Dido laughing, scrambling back up the bank and berating Simon for trying to help her.

"Riddle-fah-ree, Simon! If I'd a-needed lugging up every time I came a cropper on a hillside I'd never of seen me fourteenth birthday, would I now?"

She'd made it to the path again and grinned, black dirt streaked across her face and hair coming loose from its tie; she being, as often, in boy's clothing.

"It ain't very ladylike, Dido" Podge had pointed out, looking at Sophie with a smile as if expecting her to laugh.

"And I ain't very like a lady" Dido had retorted smartly. "Not like Sophie."

Sophie, acutely aware of her white dress and parasol, had blushed. Had caught a look, then, from Dido, that made her realise Dido was also surprised she didn't find her predicament diverting.

"I grew up in a forest" Sophie had spoken softly, looking more at Dido than at her husband. "An otter cared for me until I was five, and then an old woodman found us both and took us home. He raised me, taught me to speak and I loved him. But the otter gnawed through her box, bit him and escaped. Even though she loved me, she wouldn't live indoors. Perhaps you recall me telling you so?"

Dido had bowed, politely, white teeth shining next to the dirt as she grinned.

Sophie felt herself blushing and did not know why.

\- - -

It had been that same weekend - staying in one of the Duke of Battersea's (how odd, still, to think that that was Simon) country houses - when Dido had made a whistle from a reed. She'd wandered up down the front garden, played a lively but oddly haunting tune that Sophie eventually recognised as `Calico Alley'.

"It's the anniversary of her father's death." Simon had explained in an undertone.

"She could be a boy, couldn't she?" some other member of the party had remarked, watching her from the window.

"She could be a Duchess, if she wanted to" had replied a still more keen-eyed observer.

"She's happy being Dido," Sophie had said, sharply, loud enough to silence them. "She'll always be Dido, no matter what else happens to her."

And she'd looked down at her own smooth, pale hands and wondered, suddenly, if she could still catch fish with them.

\- - -

"You'll catch your death of the freezing gripes, Sophie!"

At the sound of Dido's voice, Sophie had stood up straight where she was in the midst of the river, pushing hair from her sweating forehead with a dripping hand. "I'll catch a fish first!"

"Didn't you think of a shawl?"

"It was a sudden impulse!" Sophie had shrugged. Yes, she was down to her petticoat and corset and yes, she had the petticoat tied up between her legs like a baby's napkin, but it really wasn't practical to fish in an afternoon gown.

Dido had sat down on a boulder, saying nothing more. So Sophie had turned her attention back to fishing, back to the instincts and currents of it, flowing back through her mind like the clear, cold water moving round her bare legs.

In what had seemed very little time, a flash of silver caught her eye and she'd pounced, raising the trout high from the water and cackling with triumph like she hadn't since the age of five.

"That's neat trick and all," Dido's eyes had widened. "Can you show me?"

That was when - Sophie knows now - she should have remembered the time or her position or what was reasonable.

"Your clothes'll get fair wet," she'd said, old speech coming back to her without her thinking about it.

"I'll take `em off, then," Dido had replied merrily.

And they were both women - it shouldn't have mattered in the slightest. Maybe it was because Dido was wearing men's clothes? In any case, Sophie suddenly realised she was looking and turned away and blushed.

They had caught four more fish.

Dido had still smelled like earth.

\- - -

"Are you going to marry Simon?" Sophie had asked Dido, some months later.

Dido, whittling something, looked up. "Did Simon ask you to ask me?"

"No. I was only wondering...people say..."

"Do you want me to marry Simon?"

Sophie had had to think about it for a moment. "I suppose," she'd said, slowly. "It would mean we could all stay together and see each other and nothing would have to change."

Dido's eyes flashed. "After all my years travelling to bits they don't put on maps, all the folks I met and I heard of, no one ever told to wish for change not to happen."

"But you don't change, Dido," Sophie had replied in a soft voice. "It must be less frightening for you, because you don't change."

Dido had come closer, had sat next to Sophie, her dark hair loose and ragged about her face and her lips chapped and bitten. "Don't I?"

She always smelt of the outdoors, and Sophie always felt a pang at it.

"You don't seem to, not like...well, not like me."

"I'll tell you this for a penn'orth of nothing," Dido had said, keeping her eyes fixed into Sophie's, piercing as needles. "The whole time I were coming back to England, I was assuming you `n Simon had gone and married each other, not knowing of course that you were twins. I felt right pleased for the two of you at the thought too." Her tongue darted out and she licked her lips, dropping her gaze to the floor. "That's changed."

Sophie had thought then that she understood what Dido meant.

But she'd been afraid to clarify.

\- - -

When high summer had come, it had been too warm to sleep. Sophie had thrown open the windows of her bedroom, desperate to breathe. The servants kept making iced cream to try and cool them, and the sharp cold of it took her back to rivers and burrows and places she was not supposed to be. Her skin prickled under her gown, and instinct told her to walk about naked rather than suffer to no purpose.

It had been on one of the midsummer nights, the mad times when the heat simmered at your thoughts and disconnected them, that Dido had climbed the wall outside her window.

It had been a moment - a mere moment - to tempt Sophie out and half carry her down. Dido had been laughing into her fist as she'd taken Sophie by the hand and dragged her into a waiting curricle, then driven them to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

There, with Dido finely dressed as she was in a blue velvet jacket and cream britches, they'd passed unnoticed around whores and magicians, gentry and one-legged beggars in solider scarlet. Dido's arm rested round her shoulders heavier than a gold necklace and Sophie had started trembling.

"Your black hair in the moonlight..." Dido had murmured to her, when they sat in white ironwork chairs by a tiny table and drank ale from bent tin mugs. "I saw a woman in South America with such hair, and she wore it up, over one ear, with a blue flower just like so..." her fingers had been brushing at the curve of Sophie's ear, and Sophie had found it hard to listen. "She was what you'd call a witch, a real gimlet-sharp lady, and she was quick as mustard."

Sophie had looked at Dido then, really looked at her, unsure if she was being teased or mocked or complimented or...courted.

Dido's face, always bronzed and frequently bruised, had an unexpectedly nervous expression. Her mouth was just a little open, enough to see the shine on the wet of her lips.

"She weren't as beautiful as you," Dido continued, very softly. "And I got to thinking, all them years at sea. About what's beautiful and what ain't, and as I grew up I realised there's more than just beauty, more than being nice. There's... the New Cumbrians called it `awydd', the South Americans `desear'." Her voice, for all its harsh accent, fitted easily around the foreign words and laced them with exoticism. "I didn't know what it meant at all. Not until this year."

Sophie had held her mug tight, looking down at it, rather than at Dido, until it folded from the pressure of her grip. "So you will marry Simon, then?"

"Simon thinks I will marry Simon," Dido had murmured. "And he's as nice and kind a cove as you'd ever hope to meet. But he don't make me... I doesn't want to..."

And that was when Dido had kissed her, mouth miraculously hot even in the sweltering heat around them, wet and agile against the angle of Sophie's jaw. Sophie had turned in to the kiss, had moved her mouth to join Dido's, without any of the thinking or planning she had associated with such a manoeuvre in the past. It was simply that she had to do it, with an urgency fiercer than running away from a horse.

They'd wound up in a darker part of the park, Sophie pressing Dido back against a tree and pressing herself to her, feeling the meeting of their chests, the softness pressing though the fabric, with a tight, desperate joy that she didn't understand, couldn't name.

"I has to take you back there," Dido had murmured at last. "You has to be home, like Cinders-face Ella."

"I hate that house," Sophie had told her then, quite without meaning to. She'd blushed and apologised afterwards, but Dido had smiled and taken up her hands and kissed them both. "I know," she'd replied. "I wish, more often than not, that I was at sea again. You should see Nantucket of a summer's night, when the whales sing."

"How I should love to swim again!" Sophie had exclaimed, purring like the otter pup she'd almost been under Dido's hand.

The next week, Dido had driven her to Hampstead Heath. They'd swum naked in a pond in the moonlight, and when Sophie had tried to climb out discreetly, she'd seen that Dido was watching.

With a sense of delicious terror, she'd slowed the movement of her limbs; let them glide out in the air, free.

\- - -

That night on the Heath had been almost three weeks ago. Earlier on this, the evening of the dinner party, Dido had come to Sophie's house by the front door for the first time since she'd climbed the wall...

\- - -  
\- - -

"Mistress Sophie?" says a voice at her elbow, breaking into her thoughts like an oar through the lily-pads.

"Oh! Brown! Yes, can I help you?" And she smiles for her butler, folding the fan away again and composing herself.

"I was wondering ma'am, what your instructions might be as to the placing of birthday gifts for the Duke and your good self?"

"The large hall table, I thought. Behind the ferns, you know, so that our friends who cannot bring anything won't feel embarrassed."

"You are sensitivity itself, ma'am." Bowing, Brown turns to leave her.

"Brown! Wait a moment!" Sophie paces swiftly after him. "I've had a visit from Miss Twite, from Dido. She cannot come tonight. Please remove her placement card and see to a proper rearrangement of the gentlemen and ladies."

"Of course, ma'am."

It is that simple, Sophie thinks, for social purposes. You remove a card or add it and the world is a different place.

Something has once more changed, but everyone will ignore it, because the last thing one must be is different.

\- - -  
\- - -

"Dido?" Sophie had exclaimed earlier that evening, surprised by the vision of a young woman in an exquisite blue satin dress arriving many hours before the start of the party. A small coil of pleasure had untwisted in her stomach and she'd smiled as if someone had broken open a shutter and let in the sunlight.

"Sophie," the woman greeted her.

"Dido?" It had been hard to believe, this elegant lady with hair climbing heights to match Sophie's own and hands in long, dove-coloured gloves. "Dido, can it really be you?"

Dido had pushed the door closed behind her, then with a stumble run forward and taken Sophie's face into her hands, kissing her and stroking a thumb at the skin just under her ear until the feeling had been too wonderful and Sophie had found herself groaning: "Dido!"

"Yes. Me." Dido had smiled, but sadly.

Dido's thumb had still been stroking, distracting, and Sophie, turning her head ever so slightly, had taken it into her mouth.

She'd never done anything like it before, but it had seemed to come instinctually, like an otter rising to the surface to breathe.

Dido had made a small, shocked noise.

Sophie had sucked gently at the thumb, moving her tongue to lap at it and looking at Dido from under her lashes. She'd known she'd been imitating something, was well aware of that, something that bawds screamed out to offer and gentle-ladies did not do. She had been imitating something one might do to a man.

All this, then, had made no sense. And yet it had made sense perfectly.

Dido's eyes had gone quite, quite black, her cheeks red. The blush had spread slowly, and Sophie had watched it as she suckled, the rosy tint moving down Dido's long thin neck and across the rounded tops of her breasts.

Lower, the outlines of Dido's nipples had been sharp under the dress and Sophie had felt pride, sudden and wonderful, in a way she had not over anything else that evening, from the ice sculpture to the successful engagement of a violin maestro for entertainment.

Finally though, with a blink and shake, Dido had pulled her hand away and kissed Sophie once, quickly, again. "Not now! Not now, for heaven's sake. Don't make me go through this dinner just thinking about you and what I'd do if we was... Cos we're not and we ain't and ain't gonna be neither."

Sophie had wanted to move her fingers to the top of Dido's dress. She had wanted to grab that fichu of lace and tear it away. She had wanted to take both hands and pull down the fabric, to get beneath and kiss and touch and lick. She had wanted to huddle with Dido, close, to take warmth from her and need nothing else. She had wanted simple, animal things that seemed necessary and all around her was the useless and artificial, stopping it.

Dido, she had noticed, had also been breathing faster than normal.

"I come to tell you," Dido had been saying. "I come to tell you before the dinner, when I can get you alone like this and give you time to understand it. I've been down the river today and signed myself up to a ship, a great schooner, what's headed Arctic ways, hunting narwhal tusk. I aim to be gone, day after tomorrow."

The incongruity of it, of this elegantly powdered lady muttering about narwhals, had struck Sophie first. Or at least something had. Her breath had gone.

An odd kind of pain had begun in her chest.

"You can't," she'd said, gasping. "You can't. You mustn't."

Dido's expression had almost broken her heart again. "I can't live here," Dido had replied, in a gruff whisper, "And not have you. And I can't rightly have you when you're married to Podge, who were my friend before and ever he were your husband."

When Sophie had first met her, Dido had been a starving child, hungry for anything, everything, only more desperate for affection than she was for sustenance.

Her eyes had been quite haunting.

Now, as she gazed at Sophie, they'd had that look again.

"And what about me?" Sophie bit her lip and blinked as rapidly as she could. "What about what I think?"

"You don't like change," Dido had reminded her softly. "And I would as lief not be the one to make you. You've got your brother here, your house, your charities. Mebbe soon a little `un and you'll have everything a right thinking woman should want. With me we could never be in London, have trouble probably anywhere in England. And you'd miss it, Soph. You'd miss it something chronic."

She'd tried to take up Sophie's hand and Sophie had snatched it away from the all-too-familiar rough skinned touch.

"This way," Dido had continued, "If I'm away a space, and we can get hold of ourselves and be different when I come back, we can still all be friends and...and I can marry Simon and nothing will have to stop. `Cept this."

Sophie had looked at her then, face wrung into a grimace, rage grating in her voice. "If you think," she'd almost shouted, "That you haven't changed me already, Dido Twite, you're the stupidest idiot girl in the whole world! Go! Go then! I was myself, or at least who I'd become, until you woke me up and I hate you for it!" Rising, she'd pointed imperiously at the door. "And I am a Lady, as you've noticed, and I no longer want you in my house. You are not invited to our Birthday Party and consider yourself unwelcome thereafter."

Dido had been shaking, Sophie had noticed. But without a word she'd left.

It had taken Sophie a little over an hour to realise that, as always, Dido had managed to achieve precisely her aim.

\- - -  
\- - -

The dinner preparations are almost complete and in the grandiose stuffiness of the Dining Room the many candles only detract from the virtue of the air.

Sophie paces round her table for the third time, not seeing anything before her but Dido's face, unable to smell even the laden bowls of oranges over the lingering taste of Dido's skin in her mouth.

She wishes she'd bitten her, at least. Marked her.

She wishes...oh, so many things.

Dido is right, she knows that. There are things that keep her here more solid than walls, more binding than wedding rings. Habit. Respectability. Custom. Love.

Having Dido...with her, hadn't broken her free, it had been more like visiting the countryside for a walk every now and again, and pretending that you lived there.

She thinks of her otter, breaking out of its box and running free, because it was all that was in its nature to do.

She thinks of touching Dido. How it was easier than conjugating French. How it came to her hands like plain stitch, like a talent.

Sophie has come to a rest just by her own seat. A small wafer of white paper is her placement card and it turns, crisp and fragile, in her fingers.

She could tear it up, right now. Run out of the front door and never look back. Follow Dido. See the whales of Nantucket.

She could put it back and enjoy her dinner party and sleep in a warm bed with so many friends and relations around her.

Over and over in her fingers, the paper turns.

This ought to be easy.  
  
---


End file.
